Through
all the financial and political scandals in Italy's recent history,
the national financial police, the para-military Guardia di Finanza,
has always been regarded as a singular bastion of rectitude.
Thus when retired General Raffaele Giudice, the Guardia's esteemed
commander from 1974 to 1978, was recently jailed as a suspected
ringleader in a $2.2 billion oil-tax fraud, it was rather like
discovering that Michelangelo painted by numbers. Last week,
as the scandal spread, four other high-ranking Guardia officers
were put under investigation, and Giudice's former chief of staff
disappeared before he could be served with an arrest warrant.
The scandal is the country's biggest
since the Lockheed bribery fiasco that forced President Giovanni
Leone to resign two years ago. It has already brought almost
199 arrests, and has cast suspicion on the martyred figure of
former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Reason: his right-hand man Sereno
Freato, 52, has been questioned about accumulating $17 million
worth of investment properties during four years when he declared
only $7,500 in annual taxable income. In addition, the scandal
has also given the Communists and other opposition groups ammunition
against the five-week-old government of Christian Democratic
Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani.
The allegations involve an elaborate
plot to falsify the tax categories of petroleum products. One
of the alleged masterminds was the multimillionaire oil company
owner Bruno Musselli, 55, who has reportedly fled to Switzerland.
Petroleum taxes in Italy are graduated; the tax on gasoline,
for instance, is 30 times higher than that on heating oil. By
forging the identifying document of a shipmentor, in some
cases, switching the oilrefiners and distributors could
pocket the illegal tax benefits. Then, said investigators, they
would bribe Guardia officers, politicians, inspectors and truckers
to keep quiet.
While Veneto magistrates delved into
it over the years, the scheme was chronicled in some 200 articles
that appeared in a small daily, La Tribuna, in the city
of Treviso. One disgusted oilman in Rome also claims that "everyone
in the industry knew for years." But no national disclosures
were made until Giorgio Pisano, a senator in the neofascist Italian
Social Movement (MSI) recently reeled of a series of charges
on the senate floor.
As Finance Minister Francesco Reviglio
promised the formation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry
last week, he conceded that eventually as many as 2,000 people
might become embroiled in the scandal.